[[quoteright:350:http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/gottlieb_logo_9925.jpg]][[caption-width-right:350:Amusement Pinballs as American as Baseball and Hot Dogs]]

Gottlieb was an American company once famous for their arcade {{Pinball}} machines. Established by David Gottlieb in 1927 (as "D. Gottlieb & Co."), the company started off producing pinball machines, but later expanded into bowling games, bat-and-balls, and other UsefulNotes/{{Arcade Game}}s.

Gottlieb will forever be associated with pinball history for two significant contributions: ''Pinball/BaffleBall'' (1931), the first successful coin-operated pinball game, and ''Humpty Dumpty'' (1947), the first pinball game to use electro-mechanical flippers. Despite this, the company was overall actually fairly conservative; the company was one of the last to abandon "wedgehead" designs, was late to multiplayer games, did not switch to solid state electronics until the late 1970s, and switched to dot matrix displays in 1992, one year after they were introduced.

As with other arcade game makers, Gottlieb attempted to break into the field of VideoGames. Their first title was 1980's ''New York! New York!'', a lackluster vertical shooter licensed from Sigma Enterprises. Their second game was ''VideoGame/QBert'', a puzzle-jumping game that rode the popularity of ''VideoGame/PacMan'' to fame and fortune. Unfortunately, Gottlieb could not capitalize on the success of ''Q*Bert'', and their other video games -- including ''Reactor, Q*Bert Qubes, Mad Planets, M.A.C.H. 3,'' and ''Krull'' -- were lost in the crowd.

In 1983, the Coca-Cola Company purchased Gottlieb's parent company, Creator/ColumbiaPictures, and transferred their pinball assets to a new subsidiary, Mylstar Electronics. After the video-game shakedown of the eighties, a management group continued manufacturing pinball machines as Premier Technology, then as Gottlieb once again. In 1987, The Coca-Cola Company spun-off Gottlieb's parent company, Columbia Pictures, as Columbia Pictures Entertainment (after the failure of ''Film/{{Ishtar}}''). In 1991, CPE, along with its Gottlieb/Mylstar/Premiere assets, was purchased by Creator/{{Sony}}, thus naming it Creator/SonyPictures (the Q*Bert franchise is currently owned by Sony Pictures Consumer Products, which explains why Columbia's credited for Q-Bert's appearance in ''Film/WreckItRalph''), a sublabel of Creator/SonyComputerEntertainment.

After the release of ''Barb Wire'' in early 1996, Gottlieb finally closed its doors, a victim of the overall decline in arcade gaming.